In fact, it’s worse than this. Job A is subordinate to job B. You get promoted to job B if you are better at job A than your peers, even though the skill sets may be entirely unrelated. This lowers the average performance on job A, and puts someone new in charge who may not be good at job B.
This isn’t an entirely fair analysis, because often being good just means being willing to put in an actual effort to the job, which is transferrable. And this is basically how promotions work everywhere. But it’s still a worrisome model.
Edit: I talked to my friend who’s father is in the military, and she says this: “In the military, my dad says you want to be the guy they can replace. You want to streamline things as best you can, fill your role, and do what you can to make the whole system run better, but without YOU specifically. Because they don’t want to promote someone who they need where he is”
Ah, the old Peter Principle and its opposite, the Inverse Peter Principle.
Peter Principle: If you’re competent, you get promoted. If you’re not competent but not bad enough to fire, you stay where you are. Therefore, all positions will eventually become filled with incompetent people.
Inverse Peter Principle: Anyone who is competent soon becomes irreplaceable and therefore ineligible for promotion. The only people who are promoted are those who aren’t good enough to stay in their current position but aren’t bad enough to fire outright.
Both patterns have been seen in large organizations.
I first heard of the second one as “the Dilbert Principal”: in any organisation, incompetent individuals are systematically promoted to the position where they can do the least damage: management. Funny (darkly funny if you’ve come across it personally), but I’m not sure ow true it really is.
Or “Percussive Sublimation” as Peter and Hull called it. Also colloquially called being kicked upstairs, which apparently goes back to 1684. (Warning: TVTropes link. Interestingly, although it has the usual list of media examples at the end, the content is all about real life. Is TVTropes extending into LifeTropes?)
There is a phrase in Latin: Promoveatur ut amoveatur—“Let him be promoted to get him out of the way.” It was apparently a pretty common one, not unbelievable considering the nepotist bureaucratic nightmare that was the Roman Empire.
the nepotist bureaucratic nightmare that was the Roman Empire
One of my goals with this thread is to figure out how to avoid such nepotist bureaucratic nightmares, which have historically dominated the long-term outlook of empires from China to Rome to, increasingly, the US.
I’m not sure you’re focusing on the right problem.
The Roman Empire’s biggest problem wasn’t nepotism, it was that the office of Emperor had no clear rules for succession. This tended to result in civil wars between the most powerful generals whenever it came to be vacant.
Inverse Peter Principle: Anyone who is competent soon becomes irreplaceable and therefore ineligible for promotion. The only people who are promoted are those who aren’t good enough to stay in their current position but aren’t bad enough to fire outright.
A useful data point: one thing they repeatedly emphasized to me in management training, was that if someone was irreplaceable, FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. Do not promote them. Do not keep them around. FIRE THEM. Otherwise they will become a challenge to your leadership, and you will continue to have to make larger and larger concessions to their idiosyncracies. People must be just competent enough to get the work done, but not competent enough to dictate terms, or the entire leadership hierarchy breaks down.
(This concept was a major contributor to my walking away from future management opportunities)
Generalizing a particular experience to the entire world is perilous :-)
True, but that wasn’t what I was doing. And if you can describe an empirically detectable difference, I WOULD appreciate it.
However, the specific adage “if someone is irreplaceable, fire them immediately” was repeated to me many, many times, by many different consultants and managers, even before I started that training.
(The original argument for it was apparently different—“anyone who is irreplaceable must spend more time defending their territory / looking for opportunities to be irreplaceable than actually doing their job, therefore they must be unproductive and contentious, therefore firing them will improve company culture”—but it evolved reasonably quickly into “anyone who understands things better than you is a threat to your power base”)
And if you can describe an empirically detectable difference, I WOULD appreciate it.
I am not quite sure what are you asking. What is proper management training? How to recognize it? Are you doubting that management training is a legitimately useful activity?
By the way, having irreplaceable people is bad, but not because they are a threat. The issue is the “hit by the bus” problem (will your organization survive if the irreplaceable person is hit by a bus tonight?) and the solution is to train more people to the same skill/competency level.
Oh, and, of course, anyone you can fire is not really irreplaceable.
By the way, having irreplaceable people is bad, but not because they are a threat. The issue is the “hit by the bus” problem (will your organization survive if the irreplaceable person is hit by a bus tonight?) and the solution is to train more people to the same skill/competency level.
Absolutely. My proposed solution was to reassign the ‘irreplaceable’ to training potential back-ups, and only firing those that refuse to do so. (A lot of people found this idea problematic, because it could lead to them creating unofficial coalitions and favor networks that did not respect the command structure).
It wasn’t a single organization; these were consultant seminars, which is why I felt comfortable making somewhat broader generalizations about the corporate environment.
Note that at the time, the subset of consultation I was involved with had something of a hero worship for “Neutron Jack” Welch and was rather obsessive about “innovative business and accounting practices” of the sort that Enron had just been hit hard for.
One factor that may explain this is that critical thinking is in a sense compartmentalised in intelligence functions.
Air Force Intelligence Officers do analysis, and their soldiers do analysis. However, in the Navy, intelligence sailors do analysis but there the officers are drawn from a common pool of naval officers under complex selection criterion (and not advertised to the public. This further emphasises that job design occurs as a crude greedy algorithm where the first generation of Officers where assigned the general job of defence and designed subordinate functions and roles from there, who in turn delegated responsibility downward without propogating information back up (which would be more like a neural network).
I want to take this opportunity to discourage any LessWrongers from joining the military, intelligence or not: In a year, a garison’d armu unit of 338 personnel sustained 242 neck, low back, ankle, patella and knee ligament injurie. It’s the only public study of its kind AFAIK. And they weren’t even infantry soldiers. That’s an obscenely high rate of injury. Joining the military, even if you’re not in combat, is probably bad for your health. The author doesn’t go into categorising the injuries into chronic and acute, but presumably some of them are chronic. I wouldn’t want to endure that after discharge. I already have chronic pain. I don’t want you to want this.
My story is that I underreported medical symptoms, mental health in particular when I first wanted to sign up for the ADF, then after putting my application on hold to study more, when I had to redo a medical form, I reported more issues (I overreported things which I didn’t quite had—self diagnosed). The nurse wasn’t happy about this. The biggest issue was the second time I DID report the mental health issues, but when the nurse interviewed me about these due to her concerns over the discrepencies betweeen the first time and the second time, I lied out of shame and said I only saw a psychiatrist twice, just went on one antidepressant for a short time and no other medications, and that was about it. And that my back pain was just temporary and not a big deal. She asked for details of these in writing from my GP to confirm. Unfortunatley I had already disclosed the identity of my GP and location of the university health service, so I really would have to go back there and ask for them to send their summary to the military who would see that I’ve clearly lied. I’ll no doubt get blacklisted straight away from the job, but also from like any security clearance. I reckon I could probably still get a job in a foreign military partner of Australia, like the United Kingdom or something. However, I reckon that the intelligence sharing agreemnts could possible mean they also share personnel security info. Its unlikely, but mite bite me sometime in my career—and I’ve demonstrated I’m shit at lying and would probably fail a serious security clerance thing anyway! I just have to hope that the foreign allies will be cool with my honest mental health admissions and such, and go for jobs that don’t require any serious clearance! I made a mistake, but I’ve learned a lot!
Call me a pussy but becoming say a medic in new zealand, while extremely appealing for the low barriers for entry, in-demand qualifications and practical skills I’ll gain, not to mention cash, community and respect, may not be worth it given how cold NZ is in the Winter!
Update 2016: I still haven’t squashed my military adventure fantasies. I need to remind myself that I’m not likely to be much more fit about military experience because I would like to become injured, particularly because of my history of muskeletal injury. ’Osteopath Paul Raw agrees: ‘I’ve seen a lot of ex-soldiers with bad backs because the idea of military-style training is to push yourself beyond your limit. This means the likelihood of eventual injury is high. It’s a British thing I think, to assume that exercise must equal pain.’ I really ought to cut out my option by telling the recruiters about my chronic pain, so I don’t do something rash, gradually. Or, perhaps if I just push this idea aside I’ll stop compulsively thinking about it. Maybe intrusive thoughts on the matter should be indication enough that it’s an unhealthy idea.
Legion is out too. It also seems that the minimum 2800-meter (1.7 mile) run in 12 minutes cooper test score for the legion is harder than a level 10 beep test so I ought not to try for the Legion, given my weak fitness!. Comments like this make it seem even less appealing: ‘....are not very sanitary, so watch as you are in the marching and chow line to the people that are blowing snot-rockets bare-handed or coughing into their hands and plunging them into the huge bread baskets, this is probably how I became sick. ’
In fact, it’s worse than this. Job A is subordinate to job B. You get promoted to job B if you are better at job A than your peers, even though the skill sets may be entirely unrelated. This lowers the average performance on job A, and puts someone new in charge who may not be good at job B.
This isn’t an entirely fair analysis, because often being good just means being willing to put in an actual effort to the job, which is transferrable. And this is basically how promotions work everywhere. But it’s still a worrisome model.
Edit: I talked to my friend who’s father is in the military, and she says this: “In the military, my dad says you want to be the guy they can replace. You want to streamline things as best you can, fill your role, and do what you can to make the whole system run better, but without YOU specifically. Because they don’t want to promote someone who they need where he is”
Ah, the old Peter Principle and its opposite, the Inverse Peter Principle.
Peter Principle: If you’re competent, you get promoted. If you’re not competent but not bad enough to fire, you stay where you are. Therefore, all positions will eventually become filled with incompetent people.
Inverse Peter Principle: Anyone who is competent soon becomes irreplaceable and therefore ineligible for promotion. The only people who are promoted are those who aren’t good enough to stay in their current position but aren’t bad enough to fire outright.
Both patterns have been seen in large organizations.
I first heard of the second one as “the Dilbert Principal”: in any organisation, incompetent individuals are systematically promoted to the position where they can do the least damage: management. Funny (darkly funny if you’ve come across it personally), but I’m not sure ow true it really is.
Or “Percussive Sublimation” as Peter and Hull called it. Also colloquially called being kicked upstairs, which apparently goes back to 1684. (Warning: TVTropes link. Interestingly, although it has the usual list of media examples at the end, the content is all about real life. Is TVTropes extending into LifeTropes?)
And there are earlier echos:
One of my goals with this thread is to figure out how to avoid such nepotist bureaucratic nightmares, which have historically dominated the long-term outlook of empires from China to Rome to, increasingly, the US.
The traditional solution is periodic revolutions.
I’m not sure you’re focusing on the right problem.
The Roman Empire’s biggest problem wasn’t nepotism, it was that the office of Emperor had no clear rules for succession. This tended to result in civil wars between the most powerful generals whenever it came to be vacant.
A useful data point: one thing they repeatedly emphasized to me in management training, was that if someone was irreplaceable, FIRE THEM IMMEDIATELY. Do not promote them. Do not keep them around. FIRE THEM. Otherwise they will become a challenge to your leadership, and you will continue to have to make larger and larger concessions to their idiosyncracies. People must be just competent enough to get the work done, but not competent enough to dictate terms, or the entire leadership hierarchy breaks down.
(This concept was a major contributor to my walking away from future management opportunities)
Are you sure it actually was management training and not a PHB (pointy-haired boss) tutorial?
Can you describe an empirically detectable difference?
Generalizing a particular experience to the entire world is perilous :-) Yours sounds particularly bad.
Management is a necessary skill, a lot of smart people do management, some of them are willing to train others.
True, but that wasn’t what I was doing. And if you can describe an empirically detectable difference, I WOULD appreciate it.
However, the specific adage “if someone is irreplaceable, fire them immediately” was repeated to me many, many times, by many different consultants and managers, even before I started that training.
(The original argument for it was apparently different—“anyone who is irreplaceable must spend more time defending their territory / looking for opportunities to be irreplaceable than actually doing their job, therefore they must be unproductive and contentious, therefore firing them will improve company culture”—but it evolved reasonably quickly into “anyone who understands things better than you is a threat to your power base”)
I am not quite sure what are you asking. What is proper management training? How to recognize it? Are you doubting that management training is a legitimately useful activity?
By the way, having irreplaceable people is bad, but not because they are a threat. The issue is the “hit by the bus” problem (will your organization survive if the irreplaceable person is hit by a bus tonight?) and the solution is to train more people to the same skill/competency level.
Oh, and, of course, anyone you can fire is not really irreplaceable.
Absolutely. My proposed solution was to reassign the ‘irreplaceable’ to training potential back-ups, and only firing those that refuse to do so. (A lot of people found this idea problematic, because it could lead to them creating unofficial coalitions and favor networks that did not respect the command structure).
What’s up with the fetish of “the command structure” in your organization? The preoccupation with power politics seem very dysfunctional.
It wasn’t a single organization; these were consultant seminars, which is why I felt comfortable making somewhat broader generalizations about the corporate environment.
Note that at the time, the subset of consultation I was involved with had something of a hero worship for “Neutron Jack” Welch and was rather obsessive about “innovative business and accounting practices” of the sort that Enron had just been hit hard for.
This can explain plenty of network behaviour I have seen. Thanks for that explanation!
One factor that may explain this is that critical thinking is in a sense compartmentalised in intelligence functions.
Air Force Intelligence Officers do analysis, and their soldiers do analysis. However, in the Navy, intelligence sailors do analysis but there the officers are drawn from a common pool of naval officers under complex selection criterion (and not advertised to the public. This further emphasises that job design occurs as a crude greedy algorithm where the first generation of Officers where assigned the general job of defence and designed subordinate functions and roles from there, who in turn delegated responsibility downward without propogating information back up (which would be more like a neural network).
I want to take this opportunity to discourage any LessWrongers from joining the military, intelligence or not: In a year, a garison’d armu unit of 338 personnel sustained 242 neck, low back, ankle, patella and knee ligament injurie. It’s the only public study of its kind AFAIK. And they weren’t even infantry soldiers. That’s an obscenely high rate of injury. Joining the military, even if you’re not in combat, is probably bad for your health. The author doesn’t go into categorising the injuries into chronic and acute, but presumably some of them are chronic. I wouldn’t want to endure that after discharge. I already have chronic pain. I don’t want you to want this.
My story is that I underreported medical symptoms, mental health in particular when I first wanted to sign up for the ADF, then after putting my application on hold to study more, when I had to redo a medical form, I reported more issues (I overreported things which I didn’t quite had—self diagnosed). The nurse wasn’t happy about this. The biggest issue was the second time I DID report the mental health issues, but when the nurse interviewed me about these due to her concerns over the discrepencies betweeen the first time and the second time, I lied out of shame and said I only saw a psychiatrist twice, just went on one antidepressant for a short time and no other medications, and that was about it. And that my back pain was just temporary and not a big deal. She asked for details of these in writing from my GP to confirm. Unfortunatley I had already disclosed the identity of my GP and location of the university health service, so I really would have to go back there and ask for them to send their summary to the military who would see that I’ve clearly lied. I’ll no doubt get blacklisted straight away from the job, but also from like any security clearance. I reckon I could probably still get a job in a foreign military partner of Australia, like the United Kingdom or something. However, I reckon that the intelligence sharing agreemnts could possible mean they also share personnel security info. Its unlikely, but mite bite me sometime in my career—and I’ve demonstrated I’m shit at lying and would probably fail a serious security clerance thing anyway! I just have to hope that the foreign allies will be cool with my honest mental health admissions and such, and go for jobs that don’t require any serious clearance! I made a mistake, but I’ve learned a lot!
Call me a pussy but becoming say a medic in new zealand, while extremely appealing for the low barriers for entry, in-demand qualifications and practical skills I’ll gain, not to mention cash, community and respect, may not be worth it given how cold NZ is in the Winter!
Update 2016: I still haven’t squashed my military adventure fantasies. I need to remind myself that I’m not likely to be much more fit about military experience because I would like to become injured, particularly because of my history of muskeletal injury. ’Osteopath Paul Raw agrees: ‘I’ve seen a lot of ex-soldiers with bad backs because the idea of military-style training is to push yourself beyond your limit. This means the likelihood of eventual injury is high. It’s a British thing I think, to assume that exercise must equal pain.’ I really ought to cut out my option by telling the recruiters about my chronic pain, so I don’t do something rash, gradually. Or, perhaps if I just push this idea aside I’ll stop compulsively thinking about it. Maybe intrusive thoughts on the matter should be indication enough that it’s an unhealthy idea.
Legion is out too. It also seems that the minimum 2800-meter (1.7 mile) run in 12 minutes cooper test score for the legion is harder than a level 10 beep test so I ought not to try for the Legion, given my weak fitness!. Comments like this make it seem even less appealing: ‘....are not very sanitary, so watch as you are in the marching and chow line to the people that are blowing snot-rockets bare-handed or coughing into their hands and plunging them into the huge bread baskets, this is probably how I became sick. ’
Interesting effect of that last point: it improves the military’s robustness to taking casualties.